OpenSWR

A High Performance, Highly Scalable Software Rasterizer for OpenGL

Overview

The purpose of OpenSWR is to provide a high performance, highly
scalable OpenGL compatible software rasterizer that allows use of
unmodified visualization software. This allows working with datasets
where GPU hardware isn't available or is limiting. OpenSWR is
completely CPU-based, and runs on anything from laptops, to
workstations, to compute nodes in HPC systems.

Click either image for more information

OpenSWR internally builds on top of LLVM, and fully utilizes modern
instruction sets like Intel® and
Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX and AVX2) to achieve high
rendering performance. The charts below illustrate the compelling advantage of
OpenSWR over Mesa llvmpipe in a real application.

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OpenSWR is now fully integrated into Mesa and provides an SWR renderer that
supports much of the OpenGL 3.3 Core and OpenGL 3.0 Compatibility contexts.
Standard Mesa environment variables provide the ability to run-time switch
between OpenSWR and llvmpipe software renderers.

For more detail, please see the "OpenSWR Overview"
presented at the Intel® HPC Developers Conference at SC15.

Since the release of early alpha, we have been busy integrating our OpenSWR
core into the Mesa project. This enables us to take advantage of a very
mature, very feature complete driver stack that would have been very difficult
to develop on our own.

The result is that OpenSWR now has far greater functionality than the OpenGL
1.4 features available in the first alpha release.

Dec 12, 2014

ALPHA release. This version is the first to be released to the public. Please bear
with us if there are build or functionality issues. The major
applications used for testing were ParaView and VisIt - if you are
trying another program you may encounter missing features.

This version is coming out as we are working on some major cleanups to
the code. In order to keep our commitment to release this to the
community and to provide a well-tested version, we are releasing the
code that was used for the SC14 demonstrations. The next major
release will contain the cleanups.